Missed a few too many days for comfort this month, for reasons. That is okay. Next month: I'm coming for you, girl!
The numbers are numbers, not dates.
My favorites here are 03, My god, my god! and 06, Sgraffito.
If you have something constructive to say about any of the pieces here:
15 — Mower Teeth
At the same
stoplight, I know it's you.
That's all, and it's nothing.
Every word I've written
for loss is the same,
a schoolroom chair
falling to pieces, plastic
and a little steel. Zapped to
space, sand in the wind.
Some pain seals
over skin like clover.
Some pain shoots
mower teeth out
of our shoes.
14 — it's really too bad / it is
wind marks the surface of / the water
plucked notes / lost here / nothing against
the flood // in the end it's just
you in that car // follow me / I'll
follow you // what's right / what's
real / who wakes me by phone
crying / you had a dream I was dead
fucking weird // love you // no one
else can be you // it's really too bad / it is
13 — spun sugar
Bald, exposing fiction:
what we see in what we see.
Past and future some
silver dust in my lungs.
The songs we
write for grief
twist as smoke.
We do nothing
but start again,
the fantastical second self
dissolving as spun sugar.
12 — To move it
A few chords and all
that floats above me
swells and falls.
The cold purifies and
tunnels, tunnels, hides
itself to die.
The pain is nothing,
really, nothing at all.
It purifies. Tunnels.
I hold my own hand.
I swear this much: when it all
grows too heavy, to move it.
11 — never tired
loud loud loud
dumb dumb dumb
young thing crashing crashing
8 stairs landing 8 stairs landing
never tired this world
open again open again
10 — No prudence
Earth turns
over under
iron teeth.
Wild yeast
some certain
laundry service.
No prudence
rules these
bright hearts
opened,
cleaned.
09 — Truth
Truth is a pressurized craft, noisy as death.
Consider the statement above
as an assertion of the poet.
Do we think she believes
what she says?
Truth: fickle light show.
Truth: a word boundless as to be meaningless.
Truth: our cages have fallen to pieces and we
still wear the same circles in the dirt.
08 — Skates
On the bend, I throw
myself off my skates. Body, the
original teacher. Here I am with
scuffed knees and a red face,
back again to
write with my hands and
learn with my feet.
07 — Woman, you've lost your edge!
We listen to the train, my head on
your chest. Ink wash catches anemic
streetlight beams through raised
weave, washing the room in green.
Mortar splinters over our
bodies, still warm. Before you
were born, your path to my
arms was scrawled in black
along the frame of a mall print,
itching under the exoskeleton.
Train turns knife and we
lie there breathing, listening.
06 — Sgraffito
The comfortable temperature
is the one you do not notice.
Language some invisible sgraffito,
the self indivisible from what? Money
behavior, the making of love, the
compulsion for impression under
new paint under dull blade.
Here, a sum of parts
of the original still living, trembling
like a palm-sized bird in a palm.
Trace long birth along bright
black veins in the rusted earth.
I know this ancient thing with
all that I am, an old friend
scaffolding gray matter.
05 — one more time
love / the garden overflowing
with tomatoes and chiles / love
the synth and the bass / love
the topmost package teetering
tongues and hands in no
particular rush / without notion
or concern / a night long and
orange and standing on its
toes under the sill / patience
aching as much as impatience
heart split by / the great kindness
of newness / one more time
04 — The needles
Laser cuts slot the low light. Man delays
death apparently with skin-safe tape
and some twine. Or otherwise plays toys.
My ancestors, in silent
domestic nations of mind,
used cross-stitch to mark time.
Late at night, in my own bed,
staring at the low light through
the laser cuts, I
feel the needles.
Look down at the
drama of bright
red blood in perfect
globes. Carrion beetles and
great mercy in the gray ash.
03 — My god, my god!
Here in my hands, a beating heart.
Textile swatches trimmed to pieces,
nylon curling under the lighter flame.
A mirror darkened in places
by the focused sun. What waits
after waiting, what lives in the blue
heat, the raw edge, the body now
spent, now crawling
for a shore eaten by the high tide?
Here in my hands, a beating heart.
My god, my god!
Here in my hands, a beating heart.
02 — all else amorphous as
Yesterday's wash off the railing like
banners for a birth, a baptism,
a marriage. Notations on this living
starched by the still wind. Fibers bleeding
in drips. Negative space as written and
all else amorphous as
the combined 54 bones
in a woman's two hands.
01 — Gluttony
Thirty opal daisies
in winter, thirty big eyes,
unblinking, in a cold peeling
from the gravel miles. Do as the
wind does and kick at this earth.
Many gloved hands work
the potting soil in a manmade
heat. Something long-fought
is won. Something is lost.